Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Police Killings Mapped

A number of high profile cases of people being killed at the hands of the police over the last few years has led to the growth in maps visualizing these deaths in the United States.

The Counted is a Guardian interactive which maps and analyses the number of people killed by the police so far in 2015. The map shows the location of each police killing recorded so far this year.

If you select a marker on the map you can read a description of the person killed and an account of the circumstances surrounding the death. The description includes links to local press reports of the incident.

There were a number of well reported instances of black American
citizens being killed by the police in 2014. Not all of them were as
well reported as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. According to
Mapping Police Violence there were at least 1175 people killed by the
police last year. 302 (25%) of them were black.
The National Police Violence Map
is a mapped timeline of the 302 black men and women killed by the
police in 2014. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate through
the year. You can click on any of the map markers to learn more about
the individual killed and a brief description of the circumstances
surrounding the death.

Home.Land.Security
say that there are many websites dedicated to mapping crime but not
many that are mapping where people feel vulnerable because of the police
themselves.

Home.Land.Security claim that many individuals "including people of
color, queer folks, and undocumented immigrants" see a police presence
as itself a threat. They have therefore determined to map police
shootings and targeted arrests for what they call "quality of life"
crimes in San Francisco.

The Home.Land.Security map allows users to view the locations of
'Officer Involved Shootings' and reported "Quality of Life Crimes". It
is also possible to load demographic data onto the map and to view San
Francisco neighborhood boundaries.